When Words are not Enough: Creative Responses to Grief (Quickthorn)

Product Information

This strikingly accessible book isn’t just for those currently bereaved, their families and friends; it’s a book for us all. Loss, and all that comes with it are a given. Something we all have to navigate and support others with. I know that my father had the best intentions that night. But the lesson I ended up learning was not, I think, the lesson he hoped to teach. The lesson I learned is that confession and obedience are primarily about saying the right things— the formulaic things, the expected things, the pious, dutiful, “Christianese” things. For years afterwards, I failed to understand repentance as a multidimensional action— an engaged and ongoing action of the heart, mind, soul, and body. Just spout the words the grown-ups want to hear, I told myself as a kid, and they’ll leave you alone. Just talk like a good Christian, and you’ll be one. Beautifully illustrated, the book explores their own responses to Josh’s death along with contributions from 14 others who have also found solace from doing and creating new things following the death of a loved one. W]e must decide what kinds of creatures we wish to be, and what kinds of lives of value we can fashion for ourselves. What do we want to know, to understand, to be able to accomplish with our time on Earth? That is far from the question of what we will cheat on and pretend to know to get some scrap of parchment. What achievements do we hope for? Knowledge is a kind of achievement, and the development of an ability to gain it is more than AI can provide. GPT-5 may prove to be a better writer than I am, but it cannot make me a great writer. If that is something I desire, I must figure it out for myself.

Jane and Jimmy’s new book, When Words are Not Enough: Creative responses to grief, explores the myriad creative ways that the bereaved find to express their loss. With a foreword by Dr Kathryn Mannix and contributions from thirteenother bereaved people. There have been some generous endorsements for the book too, so don’t just take my word for it. Published 5 Oct 22.Everything we do to attend to our grief, the authors claim is about accommodating the loss of a loved one into our on-going lives, of filling the void left by their absence. Almost by definition grief, they argue, is a creative process. It’s about making something new, something that didn’t and couldn’t have existed unless they had died.

Jane Harris is a psychotherapist and bereavement specialist with over 30 years of experience in the NHS and private practice. She is also a grief educator, supervisor and public speaker​, regularly appearing in podcasts and radio. Official Scottish Singles Sales Chart Top 100". Official Charts Company. Retrieved 22 November 2018. Drawn to this idea of photographic impermanence and as a measure of our temporal existence, we embedded some of Joshua’s ashes into the anthotypes, so that by the time his image had faded away all that remained was, in fact, all that remains. Words Are Not Enough / I Know Him So Well (UK CD single liner notes). Steps. Jive Records, Ebul Records. 2001. 9201452. {{ cite AV media notes}}: CS1 maint: others in cite AV media (notes) ( link)

Steven Hales raises the question whether, with the advent of what we might call the triumph of the machines at the tasks of civilisation, humanity might sink into stupidity, relying on machines to do and think everything for us. Why would anyone want to “bother to go through the effort of writing, painting, composing, learning languages, or really much of anything when an AI can just do it for us faster and better?” He rightly says that most people will still want to put themselves to the test, do things for themselves. And he even more rightly says that there are some things computers cannot do for us: This first publication from The Good Grief Project explores the many ways that bereaved families find to express their loss. The authors’ son was killed in a traffic accident in 2011. Ten years on they reflect on their journey and how they have used their creativity to survive their grief and maintain an on-going relationship with their son Josh. When Words are Not Enough shows us that searing loss isn’t necessarilythe end, but a possible beginning.’ Such an inspiring book – full of moving stories of people who have found active ways to respond to their grief, from photography through to (my favourite) cold-water swimming. Jane and Jimmy’s ten ‘lessons learned’ about the loss of their child wisely reject any idea of ‘moving on’ or ‘closure’. Indeed, this beautifully designed creation is itself an example of what the book is all about.’ I begin with this childhood story because I fear that many of us who are “churched” settle for this shallow, “words only” version of the Christian life, even as adults. Over time, we learn to “speak the speak.” We figure out what the magic words are— the words that will showcase our supposed spiritual maturity to the world. We “confess with our mouths” during the Sunday liturgy, or at the dinner table with our families, or in our midweek Bible studies, and somehow we forget that the life God calls us to live is a wholly integrated life— a life in which our words and our actions infuse, enrich, mirror, and reinforce each other.

Central to our experience and to an understanding of how our grief plays out, is the idea of a continuing bond with our son. We’ve devoted a specific chapter in our new book to the way this has informed and nurtured our lives without him, or without his actual physical presence. That our lives have been changed is beyond dispute, but to know that we reshape them in ways that still included Joshua was transformational. Possibly our favourite chapter in the book is ‘Out of Time’ in which Jimmy describes an early project involving the production of anthotypes, photographic images produced by laying a transparent material over paper coated with vegetable dye. As there’s no way to ’fix’ such an image, the project became a way of exploring our sense of being in time while Josh is now out of time. To be vain one has to get some thrill of gratification at others’ admiration of oneself. But computers have no such gratifications. They are never excited in more than an electronic sense. A computer can emit a sentence saying “I am gratified” and maybe even compose a philosophical essay about gratification, but it is never gratified or ungratified. It can have no pride to be wounded for that requires feeling resentment, and a computer cannot be resentful any more than it can be forbearing. It cannot sacrifice its integrity through fear of unpopularity for it can never feel fear, nor preserve or recover it when prompted by conscience for it cannot experience guilt or shame. It cannot pander to authority from ambition or have its thinking distorted by blind rage or disabling sorrow, and so on. Its existence is wholly undisturbed by this turbulence.If this overall line of thought is sound, then the price of machines achieving thought in the human sense is their losing precisely that utility which we have mainly made them for and value in them. The vindication of AI would be its nemesis. We would not so much have artificial intelligence — where intelligence is thought of as essentially the same thing in current day machines as in humans — but artificial human beings. We humans remain the measure. What computers cannot do and which explain the jargon you may hear used about grief. In the ‘Ten Things we have Learned’ the authors share the most Eurochart Hot 100 Singles" (PDF). Music & Media. Vol.19, no.52. 22 December 2002. p.23 . Retrieved 8 March 2020. The Irish Charts – Search Results – Words Are Not Enough". Irish Singles Chart. Retrieved 22 November 2018. useful things they found on their own bereavement journey. Eleven years on they have discovered how grief is almost by definition a creative process, one of making things anew